Point of Origin

'Very true,' said Vessey.

He went to a dark oak cabinet with glass doors and lifted an old brown skull from a shelf. He carried it over to us and handed it to me, pointing to an obvious coarse cut in the left parietal and occipital area, or on the left side, high above the ear.

'You asked about scalpings,' he said to me. 'An eight- or nine-year-old, scalped, then burned. Can't tell the gender, but I know the poor kid had a foot infection. So he or she couldn't run. Cuts and nicks like this are fairly typical in scalpings.'

I held the skull and for a moment imagined what Vessey had just said. I envisioned a cowering crippled child, and blood running to the earth as his screaming people were massacred and the camp went up in flames.

'Shit,' Marino muttered angrily. 'How do you do something like that to a kid?'

'How do you do something like that at all?' I said. Then to Vessey, I added, 'The cut on this' - I pointed at the skull I had brought in - 'would be unusual for a scalping.'

Vessey took a deep breath and slowly blew out.

'You know, Kay,' he said, 'it's never exact. It's whatever happened at the time. There were many ways that Indians scalped the enemy. Usually, the skin was incised in a circle over the skull down to the galea and periosteum so it could be easily removed from the cranial vault. Some scalpings were simple, others involved ears, eyes, the face, the neck. In some instances multiple scalps were taken from the same victim, or maybe just the scalplock, or small area of the crown of the head, was removed. Finally, and this is what you usually see in old westerns, the victim was violently grabbed by his hair, the skin sliced away with a knife or saber.'

'Trophies,' Marino said.

'That and the ultimate macho symbol of skill and bravery,' said Vessey. 'Of course, there were cultural, religious, and even medicinal motives, as well. In your case,' he added to me, 'we know she wasn't successfully scalped because she still had her hair, and I can tell you the injury to bone strikes me as having been inflicted carefully with a very sharp instrument. A very sharp knife. Maybe a razor blade or box cutter, or even something like a scalpel. It was inflicted while the victim was alive and it was not the cause of death.'

'No, her neck injury is what killed her,' I agreed.

'I can find no other cuts, except possibly here.'

He moved the lens closer to an area of the left zygomatic arch, or bone of the cheek. 'Something very faint,' he muttered. 'Too faint to be sure. See it?'

I leaned close to him to look.

'Maybe,' I said. 'Almost like the thread of a spider web.'

'Exactly. It's that faint. And it may be nothing, but interestingly enough, it's positioned at very much the same angle as the other cut. Vertical versus horizontal or slanted.'

'This is getting sick,' Marino said ominously. 'I mean, let's cut to the chase, no pun intended. What are we saying here? That some squirrel cut this lady's throat and then mutilated her face? And then torched the house?'

'I guess that's one possibility,' Vessey said.

'Well, mutilating a face gets personal,' Marino went on. 'Unless you're dealing with a loony tune, you don't find killers mutilating the faces of victims they don't have some sort of connection with.'

'As a rule, this is true,' I agreed. 'In my experience where it hasn't been true is when the assailant is very disorganized and turns out to be psychotic.'

'Whoever burned Sparkes's farm was anything but disorganized, you ask me,' Marino said.

'So you're contemplating that this might be a homicide of a more domestic nature,' Vessey said, now slowly scanning the cranium with the lens.

'We have to contemplate everything,' I said. 'But if nothing else, when I try to imagine Sparkes killing all his horses, I just can't see it.'

'Maybe he had to kill them to get away with murder,' Marino said. 'So people would say what you just did.'

'Alex,' I said, 'whoever did this to her made very sure we would never find a cut mark. And were it not for a glass door falling on top of her, there probably would have been virtually nothing of her left that would have given us any clue as to what happened. If we had recovered no tissue, for example, we wouldn't have known she was dead before the fire because we wouldn't be able to get a CO level. So what happens? She gets signed out as an accidental death, unless we prove arson, which so far we've been unable to do.'

'There's no doubt in my mind that this is a classic case of arson-concealed homicide,' Vessey said.

'Then why the hell hang around to cut on somebody?' Marino said. 'Why not kill her and torch the joint and run like hell? And usually when these whackos mutilate, they get off on people seeing their handiwork. Hell, they display the bodies in a park, on a hillside next to a road, on a jogging trail, in the middle of the living room, right there for all to see.'

'Maybe this person doesn't want us to see,' I said. 'It's very important that we not know he left a signature this time. And I think we need to run as exhaustive a computer search as we can, to see if anything even remotely similar to this has turned up anywhere else.'

'You do that, and you bring in a lot of other people,' Marino said. 'Programmers, analysts, guys who run the computers at the FBI and big police departments like Houston, L.A., and New York. I guarantee you, someone's going to spill the beans and next thing this shit's all over the news.'

'Not necessarily,' I said. 'It depends on who you ask.'

We caught a cab on Constitution and told the driver to head toward the White House and cut over to the six hundred block of Fifteenth Street. I intended to treat Marino to the Old Ebbitt Grill, and at half past five, we did not have to wait in line but got a green velvet booth. I had always found a special pleasure in the restaurant's stained glass, mirrors, and brass gas lamps wavering with flames. Turtles, boars, and antelopes were mounted over the bar, and the bartenders never seemed to slow down no matter the time of day.

A distinguished-looking husband and wife behind us were talking about Kennedy Center tickets and their son's entering Harvard in the fall, while two young men debated whether lunch could go on the expense account. I parked my cardboard box next to me on the seat. Vessey had resealed it with yards of tape.

'I guess we should have asked for a table for three,' Marino said, looking at the box. 'You sure it doesn't stink? What if someone caught a whiff of it in here?'

'It doesn't stink,' I said, opening my menu. 'And I think it would be wise to change the subject so we can eat. The burger here is so good that even I break down now and then and order it.'

'I'm looking at the fish,' he said with great affectation. 'You ever had them here?'

'Go to hell, Marino.'

'All right, you talked me into it, Doc. Burger it is. I wish it were the end of the day so I could have a beer. It's torture to come to a joint like this and not have Jack Black or a tall one in a frosted mug. I bet they make mint juleps. I haven't had one of those since I was dating that girl from Kentucky. Sabrina. Remember her?'

'Maybe if you describe her,' I said absently as I looked around and tried to relax.

'I used to bring her into the FOP. You was in there once with Benton, and I came over and introduced her. She had sort of reddish blond hair, blue eyes, and pretty skin. She used to roller skate competitively?'

I had no earthly idea whom he was talking about.

'Well' - he was still studying the menu - 'it didn't last very long. I don't think she would have given me the time of day if it wasn't for my truck. When she was sitting high in that king cab you would've thought she was waving at everybody from a float in the Rose Bowl parade.'

I started laughing, and the blank expression on his face only made matters worse. I was laughing so hard my eyes were streaming and the waiter paused and decided to come back later. Marino looked annoyed.